Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 3. High-Mindedness of Volatore

My aeons-long sojourn with the tiny, tiny dancing giants in the dim red caverns of sleep had made me realise how provincial my outlook had been before. How little the works of man and the hopes of man mattered and how little our dream of reality itself mattered! Still, that’s all there is and we must make the best of it.

The place in which I awoke was not far from Ebuda, the Isle of Tears. Leaving my corporeality in the world of da Carpi’s painting I took my leave of the amphitheatre and the black escarpment and as the naked idea of me without visible form I took to the air. No sooner had I done so than I felt a pull, as though a line connecting the centre of me to the centre of something else had grown taut. Land and sea unrolled beneath me as naked, bodiless, invisible, I was flying, flying, the cool air streaming past me until there appeared below me a noble city that I recognised at once: Rome!

When I saw the eternal city on her seven hills beneath me all gilded in the afternoon sunlight a thrill ran through me. It was springtime, the sky was blue, the world seemed beautiful. The Colosseum appeared, and from it rose the ghostly roar of the crowd as gladiators killed each other for their entertainment. This is how Nero and his Romans used their little mortal span, their little dream of reality. SPQR, SENATUS POPULUSQUE ROMANUS, said the standards borne by the legions. Certainly they represented the senate but what about the populace? Rome civilised the world but its roads were perhaps straighter than its politicians. From high up one looks down on what those below look up to.

I was being drawn towards the Baths of Caracalla. There seemed no danger in it as I descended to a quiet street near the ruins of the Baths. With no transition I found myself in a human mind. This was my first experience of this sort in the world of the present and ‘Wow!’ said who? ‘You’re here!’ I or someone else said in white letters advancing across a blackness. It came to me that I was in the mind of someone who called himself Guglielmo Stranieri. Although I was taking in the world through his senses I found it necessary to make constant adjustments: my eyes were side by side on the front of my head so that I had to give conscious thought to the act of seeing; as an animal I had viewed things mostly from a distance; now I had to refocus; my human senses of smell and hearing lacked the sharpness I was used to, so that I was always straining to smell and hear more. The air in the room where I sat was smoky and stale, with an underscent of garlic and sweat; beyond the room I heard engines, footsteps, voices. I was/we were looking at a small free-standing illuminated window. There was no wall around it. It was on a desk beyond which were bookshelves and a wall. On this illuminated window were white letters on a black background. They formed the words you are reading now; this is how I first saw my name spelled out. There was a feeling in me as of the sap rising in a tree. ‘I am part of the present world,’ I said. ‘I am no longer confined in a book,’ and saw my words appear in this window that is called a screen.

‘Why have you brought me here?’ I said, and on a keyboard my fingers of Guglielmo Stranieri tapped out, ‘Why have you brought me here?’

‘I need you to be my friend,’ said Stranieri on the screen.

I was startled by this; the idea of a friend had not so far occurred to me.

‘Maybe I can make you famous,’ he said.

‘Ariosto has already done that.’

‘But I can write a whole book about you.’

‘Why are you in my dream of reality?’

‘I don’t know. Reality is a mystery to me and that’s how I like it; an understood reality can only be an illusion.’

There was music coming from a machine. Among the voices I heard the name Alcina.

‘What is that?’ I asked him.

‘Vivaldi,’ he said. His opera Orlando Furioso. Do you know the poem?’

‘Too well. You have read it, have you?’

‘Of course. I am not ignorant.’

‘So this is the connection between us.’

‘I know where you live,’ he said. He/I did something with a little device and da Carpi’s painting appeared on the screen. ‘There you are in action,’ he said.

At that moment I found myself in the picture which came to life around me with the wind, the waves, the crying of the gulls, the bellowing of Orca and the weeping of Angelica. Da Carpi was standing close to her as she watched Orca with fascination and dread. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ she wailed. ‘That monster must have a thing on him like a barge-pole! Don’t let him deflower me, he’ll split me in two!’

‘He doesn’t want to deflower, he wants to devour you,’ said da Carpi. ‘He’s not after your virginity.’

‘He’s a male, isn’t he?’ said Angelica. ‘And that’s what all males are after. If one of them has to have me, let it be Ruggiero or the hippogriff.’

‘Is sex all you think of?’ said da Carpi.

‘That’s all the males of this world think of,’ snapped Angelica. ‘My beauty is the rock that I am chained to, my juiciness, my sweet flesh, my firm young breasts and bouncy buttocks, Ah!

‘ “La fiera gente inospitale e cruda

alla bestia crudel nel lito espose

la bellissima donna, cosi ignuda

come Natura prima la compose.

Un velo non ha pure, in che richiuda

i bianchi gigli e le vermiglie rose,

da non cader per luglio o per decembre,

di che son sparse le polite membre.”*

‘That’s what Ariosto wrote about my “lily-whiteness and my blushing roses” and all the rest of what you’re staring at, that these cruel people are offering up to Orca.’

‘You know Orca doesn’t get you in Ariosto’s story,’ said da Carpi, ‘so what’s all the fuss about?’

Angelica was not to be pacified.

‘I don’t know that he doesn’t get me until it doesn’t happen,’ she said. ‘That’s how real you made this picture.’

‘I got beyond myself,’ said da Carpi, ‘I painted realer than I knew how. I never did anything this strong before and I never did anything this strong after. That’s why I keep coming back to it and shaking my head in bafflement.’

‘And that’s why I came here to talk to you,’ I said (I was speaking only as the idea of me, so I was not visible to da Carpi). ‘How do you account for the power of this painting?’

‘Where is that voice coming from?’ he said, looking all around.

‘I’m a disembodied thought. Don’t let this bother you — after all, you’re not quite the usual thing either, loitering in your painting centuries after your death.’

‘Very well, I suppose one must make allowances. You were saying?’

‘How do you account for the power of this painting?’

‘I can’t,’ said da Carpi, shrugging his shoulders and turning up the palms of his hands.

‘Try to remember who was uppermost in your mind while you worked: was it Angelica, Ruggiero, the hippogriff or Orca?’

‘Volatore,’ said da Carpi.

I was surprised to hear him use the name I had given myself.

‘Who’s Volatore?’ I said.

‘The hippogriff. That’s what I named him.’

‘Strong name.’

‘Strong flier, more heroic than the hero he carried. Look at him, fearless as he swoops on the monster, carrying Ruggiero to the attack. Orca will try to bring Volatore down so he can get to Ruggiero but the hippogriff dares all. Look at him!’

As I looked, the smell of the sea and all the sounds came to me and I saw myself as the strange flying beast in the painting.

‘Volatore,’ said Angelica. ‘I like that name and he’s so big and strong and he’s not afraid of anything. A woman would be safe with him.’

Keep thinking that, Angelica, I said to myself. Just give me a little time to find the right body. I tensed the muscles of my shoulders and back and they felt weak and flabby.

‘Forgive me,’ I said as these words appeared and the da Carpi scene dissolved.

‘No offence taken,’ said Stranieri. ‘I know that my body isn’t suitable; the bond between you and me is a different sort of thing: I shall be with you always to live your story into words. And after all, words alone are certain good.’

‘Says who?’

‘Yeats, top poet.’

‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

‘Never mind,’ we said. ‘Let’s get corporeal.’

* The harsh, inhospitable islanders

Exposed the lovely maiden on the strand.

So absolute a nakedness washers.

She might have issued then from nature’s hand.

No veil or flimsiest of gossamers

Had she to hide her lily whiteness and

her blushing roses which never fade or die.

But in December bloom as in July